Windows/Linux: IMDB is a great reference tool if you'd like to learn more about the movies in your collection, and MDB is a simple application that will scan a folder full of movies and display each film's IMDB information in an easy-to-read GUI. You can scan each film's rating, poster art, director, major actors, year of production, and more, even a plot synopsis, all in one window.

What makes MDB really unique is that it can sift through even oddly named and parsed movie names and file names to determine what the actual film in the file is really called. It's a tiny, lightweight shell application, and it only pulls up the UI when you right-click on a folder full of movies and ask it to analyze them. Some home theatre apps have this functionality built-in, but if you're not interested in installing one of them just to scan through a folder full of movies to decide what to fire up in VLC, MDB is a perfect tool.

MDB is free, fast, and works through proxies, so it'll work just about anywhere. Give it a try and let us know what you think—or if you have an alternative tool—in the discussions below.